Update from the Philippines – October 2017

In October 2017, our team of medical volunteers travelled to the Adventist Hospital, Santiago City in the Philippines for the sixth surgical trip.

The team performed 84 operations across five and a half days. They worked as a team with local medical and nursing staff, helping young children through to elderly people who would otherwise have remained blind but now were able to receive the gift of sight.

Due to the increasing need to restore sight in the district and encouraged by the success of the project so far, Foresight, in partnership with Open Heart International, is working to expand its Philippines operation over the next few years. The first step is to train more local health care workers to extend the screening operations to the surrounding rural areas to reach the most disadvantaged. A training and teaching visit is planned for late 2018 with an expanded surgical team organised for May 2019.